Tag: ecs

Recently I had the opportunity to set up another ECS cluster for a Ruby on Rails application that exposes a few API endpoints and a backend to manage some contents, i.e. images, videos and so on.

Considering our previous experience we decided to automate the provisioning of the infrastructure by using Ansible and after a bit we ended up with a few playbooks that allowed us to bring up everything we needed, from the DB to the instances, ELB, task definitions and services.

Everything was working quite well until we were asked to provide a static IP that could be used to access the aforementioned API endpoints.

ECS is a good product. Sadly it’s authored by the same UX designer that authored all other AWS products, so a lot of people couldn’t even succeed in starting a simple hello world container.

Some months ago @fusillicode wrote a two-part tutorial on how to dockerize and deploy on ECS a WordPress app (you can find them here: part 1 and part 2). Of course, given we’re talking of docker, the technology you’re using is not so important.

‘Two article ago’ I wrote about my initial experience with Docker and ECS, the container service, built on top of EC2, offered by Amazon. Here it is if you want to take a look.

Today I want to continue in that direction describing the configuration of containers (or better container) I choose to serve the application selected as guinea pig to try ECS. Just as a reminder, the app was an almost standard WordPress blog with a custom theme and a few plugins.